in reply to open a pipe from system..

You have the terminology right - you want to open the filehandle: 

  open my $fh, 'pdftohtml x.pdf |' or die "Can't run pdftohtml: $!";

[download]
However, that assumes that pdftohtml will spit its output to stdout rather than a file - I don't know this.

The other alternative is for myPerlPrg.pl to fake this by having it take the x.pdf file, create the x.html file, and read it in a single execution. The command line would look like: 

  myPerlPrg.pl x.pdf x.txt

[download]
You could create a temporary filename, pass that to pdftohtml, and then use that to read the HTML to convert to text.

Hope that helps,

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re^2: open a pipe from system..
by Anonymous Monk on May 01, 2005 at 15:36 UTC
    ehem?

    I can run pdftohtml without using either system or exec?

    It means that

       open my $fh, 'pdftohtml x.pdf |' or die "Can't run pdftohtml: $!";

    [download]
    1st runs pdftohtml?
    2nd creates a file handle (in var $fh)?
    3rd I can read the output of pdftohtml from this $fh?

    Thanks a lot, going to try it :-)

    Carl

[reply]
[d/l]
      thanks a lot!

      This works perfectly:

        open my $fh, "pdftohtml -noframes -stdout $pdf |" or die "Can't run 
+pdftohtml: $!";
  while (<$fh>) {
    &func($_);
  }
  close($fh);

      [download]
      option -stdout is needed (in case s.o.else is searching) to catch the output.

      have a nice Subday
      Carl

[reply]
[d/l]

In Section Seekers of Perl Wisdom